Gucci / Spring 2012 RTW

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Getting up at 4:00 a.m. to make a flight from London and arrive in Milan in time to see Gucci pales into insignificance considering the rigors of work that the Italian house’s creative director,Frida Giannini, is currently coping with. In addition to the spring collection she showed today, Giannini will host a party for the house’s newly renovated Milan boutique, at Via Monte Napoleone 5/7, tonight, and then in just a matter of days, head to Florence to inaugurate that city’s Gucci museum with a major, major, major party. Yet here she is backstage after her show, looking all radiant and tawny and relaxed, while anyone else would be forgiven for being crumpled in the corner, perhaps rocking back and forth, if they were feeling particularly strung out. Giannini’s beatific state must certainly be due to the sharp, strong, and gold-shard glamour of the collection she’d just sent out. Giannini stripped back the Gucci-isms to a few key leitmotifs: enamel tiger heads, graphic equestrian prints, a gilded chain strap on an otherwise stark-luxe black-and-gold hobo bag. “I’d barely looked at the archives this season; the collection’s not really about that,” she said, surely reckoning that, since Gucci’s past is going to be so present over the next week, she should keep forging on ahead into the future.

Not that there wasn’t a little backward glance or two, though it was to the social, sexual, and stylistic revolution of the twenties, perhaps most explicitly the Art Deco elegance of America—an ocean away from Florence, where in that same decade, house founder Guccio Gucci was just starting to sell luggage from the family saddle-makers. In particular, she was looking to the gilded gals of the Jazz Age, those ladies divine and decadent in equal measure: “The women of that time who caused a sensation—Nancy Cunard, Louise Brooks,” Giannini said. There was certainly plenty of their then-radical idea of femininity, and their desire to express their sexuality without constrictons or restrictions in the graphically ornate series of black, white, and gold flapper dresses which, despite the weight of their beaded formations, moved in the most sinuous and lightest of ways; dresses that were an alluring alternative to the kind of hard-edged va-va-voom that Giannini has given Gucci in the past. Elsewhere, she worked an androgyne theme but cleaned and gleamed it up with many chic permutations of short, metallic jackets, worn over black pants that tapered long and narrow over the ankles, embellished with gilt buttons.

Of course, if you’re going to work that hard on all of this, you’d better at least know there is something you can wear from your own collection to your own party later in the week. So which look will it be, Frida? “That one!” Giannini said, laughing, as she pointed to the running order pinned up backstage. “Number 36.”